Category Archives: Courts

The Free Law Project recently announced the availability of PACER Docket Alerts on CourtListener.com. CourtListener is a free public access website tracking federal and state courts. The Docket Alert tool will send you an email anytime there is a new court filing in a case you are following in PACER. Access to PACER documents is provided by the website’s RECAP function. Clicking on the RECAP Archive link allows users to search for available PACER filings.

Setting up Docket Alerts using CourtListener is simple (quoting the Free Law Project’s press release):

“The best way to get started with Docket Alerts is to just make one. Try loading a popular case like U.S. v. Manafort or The District of Columbia v. Trump. Once the case is open, just press the “Get Alerts” button near the top. Then, just wait for your first alert.”

Give it a try. I did with U.S. v. Manafort and the Docket Alerts started flowing in the very first day the alert was set, and they just keep coming.

The primary source powering these alerts is RSS data provided by PACER websites. However, not all courts have RSS feeds yet. So another very important source is the docket information contributed by RECAP users. Attorneys and others who download documents from the PACER system using their paid accounts can participate by installing the RECAP Extension to then upload these same documents to CourtListener’s RECAP Archive. To date, 37M PACER docket entries have been uploaded to the RECAP Archive which includes 6.5M searchable PDFs. The RECAP Archive continues to grow with the addition of over 100,000 docket entries and 2000 PDFs every day.

The value of CourtListener goes well beyond RECAP and PACER. CourtListener also provides a free searchable archive of over 4M court opinions with more being added by the day. They also have one of the largest collections of oral arguments available on the Internet. Their coverage page breaks down the figures and services in greater detail.

There really is no other legal website like it. As the courts continue to charge the public fees for access to PACER, the Free Law Project practices what they call PACER Advocacy to bring these documents out into the light for the world to see for free.

Access to free PACER Docket Alerts is not unlimited, however. Any user can monitor five dockets for free. Those who install the RECAP Extension will get an additional ten docket alerts. Users who make monthly contributions to the Free Law Project can make as many alerts as they need (within a reasonable limit). The current suggested minimum monthly donation is five dollars per month.

The USA TODAY NETWORK has recently published the results of a survey in which practicing attorneys throughout the state were asked to score the county judges before whom they have appeared. The Wisconsin Judicial Performance Database compiles more than 4,000 responses rating 209 Wisconsin circuit court judges.

Below is a snapshot of the highest rated Milwaukee County judges (click on image to enlarge).

According to the article, the survey “incorporates not just the attorney survey results, but also reports the number of times lawyers sought substitute judges to avoid their courtroom, and the number of times their rulings were overturned in appeals courts.” These figures, as shown to the right, are available on a “Details” screen for each judge.

For more info on the survey, how it was conducted, and some caveats about the results, see the Green Bay Press Gazette. Hat tip to Eric Litke, Investigative Reporter, USA TODAY NETWORK.

The Free Law Project has recently announced that in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Labor and Georgia State University, they have collected every free written order and opinion that is currently available in PACER.

New opinions will be downloaded every night (!) to keep the collection up-to-date.

Currently, the collection contains about 3.4 million orders and opinions from cases dating back to 1960. All of the documents are available for search, and the Free Law Project has also partnered with the Internet Archive to upload a copy of every opinion as well (the Internet Archive is a non-profit whose mission is to permanently store digital content).

Beginning in November, the US Supreme Court will require electronic filing of case documents. According to a SCOTUS press release, counsel will initially submit filings both in print and electronically. An exception will be made for pro se parties; Court personnel will scan and make their filings available electronically.

Once the system is in place, the new electronic filings will be made freely available from the Court’s website. The e-filings will not be part of PACER system, reports the National Law Journal.

The authors examined political donations made by Supreme Court clerks and found that:

on average, a justice would cast approximately 4% more conservative votes in a term when employing his or her most conservative clerks, as compared to a term in which the justice employs his or her most liberal clerks.

We find larger effects in cases that are higher profile (17%), cases that are legally significant (22%), and cases in which the justices are more evenly divided (12%). We interpret these findings to provide suggestive evidence that clerk influence operates through clerks persuading their justice to follow the clerk’s preferred outcome, rather than through justices delegating decision-making to clerks.

My Own Words is a delightful read. The words and stories are hers. A woman ahead of her time. Lucky in love to have met life partner, Marty, who was her champion in all things. The strong work ethic and independent streak she got from her mom. A mother herself juggling work-life balance. An avid reader from early on who also happens to love opera. These are some of the pictures her stories paint.

Arranged in five Parts, the book includes editorials, speeches, tributes, remarks on some of the major cases of our era, and essays on the work of a Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. Each Part, and their attending chapters are set up with short introductions by Justice Ginsburg’s official biographers, Mary Hartnett and Wendy W. Williams.

The collection begins with an editorial she wrote for her school newspaper in 8th grade. The year is 1946, just after WWII, and she writes: “Since the beginning of time, the world has known four great documents, great because of all the benefits to humanity which came about as a result of their fine ideals and principles.” She is speaking about the Ten Commandments, Magna Carta, Bill of Rights, and Declaration of Independence. “And now we have a fifth great document, the Charter of the United Nations.”

One piece not written by Ruth, but rather her husband, Marty, comes in the form of remarks he made as he introduced the Honorable Ruth Ginsburg on the occasion of the 20th Anniversary of Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellowship Program at Georgetown University Law Center in 2003. A man full of wit and good humor, and as you can tell by his comments, lots of love and admiration for his wife.

The legal profession was not populated by many women when she graduated from Columbia Law School in 1959. She was a trailblazer, but by no means alone. In Part Two, she offers tribute to other women who have led the way. These include historical figures such as Belva Ann Lockwood, the first woman to argue a case before the nine Justices, and the brave Anne Frank, as well as, contemporaries like Sandra Day O’Connor, and Gloria Steinem. Ginsburg writes of Justice O’Connor’s approach to all things: “Waste no time on anger, regret or resentment, just get the job done.”

The 1970s saw Ruth Bader Ginsburg use her legal skills to advocate and advance the cause of women as equals before the law. The decade was very productive for her, and many other women, as gains were made legally and socially. The chapters in Part Three speak to her role in this movement, one of which, “The Frontiero Reply Brief” marked her first oral argument before the Supreme Court in 1973. That same year she wrote in the ABA Journal “The Need for the Equal Rights Amendment.” Despite the ERA’s failure in 1982 three states short of ratification, the cause of gender equality had moved forward.

President Jimmy Carter appointed Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 1980. President Bill Clinton then appointed her to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1993. The selections in Part Four include her Rose Garden Nomination Acceptance Speech, and Opening Statement before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Part Five – The Justice on Judging and Justice – is by far the longest in the book and begins with “Workways of the Supreme Court” in which Justice Ginsburg describes the “procedures at my workplace.” She explains “one cannot get a firm grasp on the substance of our decisions without some grounding in the rules, practices, and traditions that frame our decisionmaking.” The next two chapters speak to “Judicial Independence” and the work of the Chief Justice in her “Tribute to Chief Justice Rehnquist.”

The chapters that follow return to two themes so very central to this book: human rights and the administration of justice. In “Human Dignity and Equal Justice Under Law,” Justice Ginsburg speaks about Brown v. Board, and Loving v. Virginia to reflect on the pivotal role these decisions have had in advancing the cause of freedom and equal protection under law for all. Loving was decided by unanimous decision, but many others are not. Part Five also includes a section on the role of dissenting opinions, and the bench dissent. In her own words, you can read seven of her recent bench dissents in cases such as Ledbetter, Sebelius, and Hobby Lobby.

No review would be complete without a story about Ruth’s love for the opera. It is well known she and Justice Antonin Scalia shared this passion. Composer Derrick Wang penned “Scalia/Ginsburg: A (Gentle) Parody of Operatic Proportions” a comedy in one act inspired by the two Justices’ opinions and the operatic precedent of Handel, Mozart, Verdi, Bizet, Sullivan, Puccini, Strauss, et al. (see38 Columbia Journal of Law and Arts 237 (2015)). She writes in preface “If I could choose the talent I would most like to have, it would be a glorious voice.”

This collection of short stories shine a light on the arc of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s life and career. Each one is unique, special, and enjoyable to read in their place. Together they form a much fuller picture of one of the most intelligent, worldwise, and thought-provoking jurists of our time. Readers can delight in the fact there is a full-length biography underway to be published when the time is ripe.

While the 10 cents a page that most people are charged to view documents doesn’t sound like much, critics say that the very existence of the paywall has stifled the development of tools to meaningfully search and analyze the data.

“You should be able to say, for example, ‘Give me everything that has the word motion in its description and that talks about copyright,’” says Mike Lissner, executive director of the nonprofit Free Law Project. “That’s not possible.”

Lissner, whose group provides free online access to primary legal materials, says the system’s shortcomings are a direct result of the fees attached to Pacer documents. “If the data were free,” he says, “you’d see an ecosystem cropping up with competitive services improving it.”

The case is currently before the US District Court for the District of Columbia. Judge Ellen Huvelle is expected to decide in the coming days whether a lawsuit accusing the government of setting Pacer fees at unlawfully high rates can proceed.

According to a recent edition ofThe Third Branch, the quarterly newsletter of the Wisconsin court system, the mandatory eFiling rule takes effect July 1 but will be phased in gradually over the next three years.

Mandatory eFiling will be established first in a small number of pilot counties that already offer voluntary eFiling in civil, family, small claims and paternity cases and then expand in those case types to other counties statewide by the end of 2017. Other case types will be added with a targeted completion date for mandatory eFiling in all case types statewide by Dec. 31, 2019.

The court’s CCAP staff will implement the program with initial help from contractors.

A class action lawsuit filed yesterday in federal court in Washington, D.C., challenges the fees charged by PACER, the federal courts’ online court records system, as excessive. The lawsuit seeks to obtain relief on behalf of “all individuals and entities who have paid fees for the use of PACER within the past six years, excluding class counsel and agencies of the federal government.”